“I said his name was Colin,” she said, “because I like the name, and it goes nicely with Cuttleford, don’t you think? And she said she thought the man who built Cuttleford House was named Frederick, so when I told you the story—”
“You improved it.”
“Just to make it a better story. Anyway, that’s why I’m awake. How about you?”
“I was reading,” I said, “and I lost track of the time.”
“I bet you were looking for something to steal.”
Time to nip this in the bud. “You know,” I said, “it made a nice joke, Millicent, but it’s beginning to get a little tiresome. I was just kidding about being a burglar.”
“You were?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you really?”
“Well, I’m out of work at the moment,” I said. “I’m hoping something will turn up soon. In the meantime, I’ve sort of been helping Carolyn out at the Poodle Factory. What’s so funny?”
She had both hands over her mouth, smothering a laugh. “The Poodle Factory,” she sputtered. “A factory where they make poodles!”
“It’s just the name of her salon.”
“And you work there.”
“That’s right.”
“Just to help her out.”
Kids. Why on earth do people have them? “And to pass the time,” I said.
“And you’re not really a burglar.”
“Of course not.”
“And you don’t break into houses and steal things.”
“Gosh, no,” I said. “I’d be scared, for one thing. And it wouldn’t be right to take things that didn’t belong to me.”
She thought this over. Then she said, “You know how I made up the part about Frederick Cuttleford? Well, I think you made that up.”
“About being a burglar.”
“About not being a burglar,” she said. “You know what? I don’t believe you. I think you’re a burglar after all, no matter what you say.” And she flashed me a demonic smile and darted around the corner.
CHAPTER
Eleven
The library, when I finally got to it, was dark. Someone had drawn the curtains and switched off the lights. I stood at the threshold, trying to determine the most natural way to go in there and get the book. I had packed a narrowbeam pocket flashlight, but I’d left it in my room (or our room, or Aunt Augusta’s, as you prefer). I could have gone upstairs to fetch it, but I’d had enough trouble already trying to find my way back to the library. I didn’t want to have to look for it again.
Besides, there was something impossibly furtive about skulking around with a flashlight. One transformed oneself into a bumbling burglar out of the Sunday comics, the sort always portrayed wearing a domino mask and carrying a burlap sack of swag over his shoulder.
Why bother? I was a paying guest at Cuttleford House, fully entitled to be there. In the absence of a posted curfew, I had every right to make use of the Great Library at any hour of the day. There was, in short, no need to skulk. I could stride manfully in, bold as any base metal, switch on all the lamps I wanted, mount the library steps, fetch the book I wanted, and take it back to my room. Moreover, I could do all of that without committing the merest infraction of the house rules, let alone the criminal code. I wouldn’t even risk arousing suspicion. I was a guest, I wanted something to read before going to sleep, and where better to find the book of my choice than the library?
I would have to be on my way back to New York with the book tucked away in my luggage before I’d have done anything that could provoke so much as a raised eyebrow.
Still, there were precautions to be taken. Somewhere down the line, when the book went under the hammer at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, say, the volume’s provenance would best be established by citing the Lester Harding Ross memoir, and anyone else could do as I had done, walking back the cat (as the counterspies call it) all the way to Ferdinand Cathcart’s little pleasure dome in the Berkshires. It would be just as well if no one was in a position to remember seeing one Bernard Rhodenbarr striding through the halls of Cuttleford House with The Big Sleep clutched to his bosom.
First things first. Get the book, in an unobtrusive fashion, and tuck it away for safekeeping. Then get it off the premises and get it home. Sit on it for a while, thrilling in its possession, and then figure out a good cover story—how it had been at the bottom of a sack of book club editions and Grosset reprints that someone walked in off the street with, how I’d grabbed it up along with a dozen other old books in a thrift shop in Staten Island, how it was part of a nondescript collection of volumes acquired at a garage sale somewhere in Nassau County. It wouldn’t be hard to tailor a story to fit the circumstances.
First, get the book.
And I was on my way. I was all set to enter the room, had in fact already extended one foot across the threshold, when I heard somebody talking.
I leaned forward and turned my head to aim an ear in the direction the sound had come from. It was impossible to make out, but someone was saying something, speaking in a hushed whisper at the far corner of the library from where I was standing. The very corner, in point of fact, where Raymond Chandler’s first novel reposed (or had when last I looked) on the uppermost shelf.
Rufus Quilp, muttering in his sleep? Not unless he’d moved from the site of his earlier slumber. I slipped a little deeper into the shadows and stopped trying to see in the darkness, which was plainly impossible. I closed my eyes entirely, with the thought that it might sharpen my hearing. It’s supposed to work for blind newsdealers, but I guess it takes years, because it had no immediate effect as far as I could tell. Just silence and murmuring and more silence and more murmuring.
More than one person. I was suddenly sure of that, because it seemed to me that one hushed whisper was responding to another hushed whisper. It remained impossible, though, to identify either whisperer, or to make out a word of what was being whispered.
Who could it be? The missing Miss Hardesty, two-timing poor Miss Dinmont and cuddling on the sofa with the upstairs maid? That rotter Dakin Littlefield, out from under the goosedown coverlet of his marriage bed and getting some sauce for the gander? Were these two even lovers at all, or were they conspirators planning…planning what? The overthrow of a Balkan government? It seemed to me that was what conspirators used to plan in English-country-house mysteries, and, now that there are once again Balkan governments begging to be overthrown, perhaps those people are back to their old tricks.
But what difference did it make what was being said or who was saying it? I’d already decided that I didn’t want to call attention to myself, and that meant I couldn’t barge in on their hush-hush conversation, switching on lamps and dashing up ladders. In fact it probably meant I shouldn’t be lurking in the doorway, just waiting to be found out and exposed for what I so obviously was, a despicable eavesdropper manqué.
I was frozen there, wanting to leave but wishing I could see who they were and hear what they were saying. Then, from out of nowhere, something came and brushed against my ankle.
The cops, I thought, because that’s the first thought that pops into my mind when something takes me by surprise. It was not an enduring thought, however, because it has been my experience that, while cops are apt to do many unsettling and sometimes inexplicable things, brushing up against your ankle is rarely one of them.
A ghost. That was my next thought, prompted no doubt by Carolyn’s fears and Millicent Savage’s mischief. I wasn’t sure that I believed in ghosts, but if such a thing existed, well, a ghost couldn’t ask for a better house to haunt, or a better night to walk the earth. Did ghosts rub up against one’s ankles?
While I was pondering the point, it did it again. And now I knew what it was, and it wasn’t the cops and it wasn’t a ghost. It made a sound, you see, and it wasn’t the sort of sound a cop would make (“Put your hands on the wall!”), nor was it the clanking of chains or the wail of a banshee.
The sound wa
s akin to that of a very expensive and well-bred motorcar, its powerful engine idling, waiting for the light to change. In a word, it was purring.
I bent down and scooped it up in my arms, hoping it would stick to purring and not switch to anything as attention-getting as a full-throated miaow. And then, while a pair of invisible Anatrurian provocateurs went on inaudibly plotting a coup, I played the perfect counterspy—I walked the cat back to my room.
I guess he was hungry. That’s what it usually means when Raffles does his ankle-brushing number, although it’s tempting to interpret it as a display of affection. (Maybe that’s what any display of affection really means, regardless of the source—“Hi there! I want something from you!”)
Back in Aunt Augusta’s bedchamber, I found the red plastic bowl we’d brought along, and the box of Friskies, poured the latter into the former, and put it down where he could get at it. He stood there in the dark, eating, and I stood there and watched him, and then he walked over to the door, which I’d closed, and made pathetic declawed scratching noises until I opened it and let him out.
I closed it again, took off clothes and put on pajamas, then opened it and left it ajar. In the double bed provided for us, Carolyn rolled over and snarled softly in her sleep. She’d been sleeping on one side of the bed, but now she was smack in the middle.
Outside our window, the snow went right on falling. If it had ever stopped or even slowed its pace, you couldn’t prove it by me; every time I’d looked out a window, there it was, great big flakes of it, falling in great profusion. From where I stood there was no way to gauge its depth, but I figured there had to be a foot of it out there at the very least.
I got into bed, trying to pick the side with the most room. I settled my head on the pillow and got an elbow in the ribs from Carolyn. I tried to make do with the space available to me, but that didn’t work. I’d start to drift, and then Carolyn would move around enough to rouse me with a knee or an elbow, or I’d draw so close to the edge of the bed that I’d start to fall out of it.
After a little of this I decided I had to risk waking her, and I put one hand on her hip and the other on her shoulder and shoved her gently but firmly over toward her side of the bed. That seemed to work, but then she came rolling back, and her arm wrapped around me as her face wound up nestled against my chest.
I had to lie there and decide how I felt about this. Carolyn is certainly an attractive woman, but it’s safe to say she’s not my type, even as I am emphatically not hers. One of the ways in which women differ from men, it seems to me, is that the distinctions between gay and straight are a little more apt to blur for them. A lot of straight women seem inclined to experiment with a female lover now and then—Carolyn keeps getting involved with women of this sort, and keeps swearing it’s a mistake she’s made for the last time. And I’ve known lesbians with a similar inclination to try something different once in a blue moon.
Not Carolyn. She’s no more interested in having sex with a man than I am. That was clear from the day I met her, and it made it easier for our friendship to develop. We were best friends, we were buddies, and one thing we were not destined to do was share a pillow.
But that was what we were doing. She may have had a pillow of her own, but her head was on my pillow now, and so was mine.
No problem. If I hadn’t had that interlude with Lettice in the East Parlour, maybe my body would have had other ideas. But it was a tired and depleted old body by now, and all it wanted was a good night’s sleep. Toward that end, huddling together for warmth like this was just what the doctor ordered. Snug in the arms of my best friend, basking in her body heat, I felt myself drifting.
See, I had the edge here. I was awake.
Carolyn was not. Sound asleep, though not in sleep’s deepest stage, she had no idea the person she clung to was her good buddy Bernie, or indeed any man at all. She was probably dreaming, and I’m sure you know how a dream will change direction in order to accommodate to circumstance. If the phone on the nightstand rings, the sleeper instantly inserts a ringing telephone into the scenario of his dream. Carolyn’s dream had to embrace not a ringing telephone but a warm body, and in her dream it became a female body, a lover’s body.
In the dream, she began to make love to this body to which she was clinging.
And not just in the dream.
It was unendurably weird. There I was, on the verge of sleep, and my best friend in the world was nuzzling my neck and moving her hands on my body. I wanted to wake her up, but I couldn’t think of a way to do so without making things worse. Wouldn’t it be better to wait it out?
Hard to say. On the one hand, the dream could quickly run its course. (They’re speedy little devils, always demanding far more time to recount than it takes to dream them in the first place.) On the other hand, there was always the chance that Carolyn’s wandering hand would fasten on a part of me not entirely consistent with the fabric of her dream, and that might give new meaning to the term “rude awakening.”
What to do? Suppose I just let out a scream and sprang out of bed. I could say I was having a nightmare, and by the time she’d calmed me down she would have lost all track of her own dream. Still, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do, and how would either of us be able to get back to sleep after that?
She moved, burrowing still closer, fitting herself against me. Her thighs wrapped around my leg, and she sort of rocked against me in a fairly basic rhythm. It took me a minute to realize what was happening, and then I just lay there while it went on happening, with the pace picking up a little and growing a touch more urgent. Then her hands tightened their grip on my arms, and she gave a little terrier-like yelp and followed it with a sort of moan, and then she sighed and rolled away from me and was still.
You can never tell her about this, I told myself. In fact, I added, it would be best all around if you could manage to forget that it ever happened.
Fat chance, I thought. About as much chance as I had of getting to sleep, and I’d been so close to drifting off….
The next thing I knew it was morning, and somebody somewhere was screaming bloody murder.
CHAPTER
Twelve
Any number of things can set a person screaming. A mouse, say, emerging suddenly from behind a piece of furniture, is apt to coax a cry from the lips of the right sort of woman. (In my experience, it’s altogether useless to point out to such a woman that the mouse is more afraid of her than she is of it. Few women seem to find this information comforting, and I’m not even sure it’s true. You rarely hear a mouse scream when a woman pops out from behind the sofa.)
By the same token, a scream might indicate that the screamer had just seen a ghost, or a potential assailant, or a winning number on his lottery ticket. “Scream bloody murder” is, after all, just an expression, and just because you’ve heard such a scream doesn’t mean you’re going to find a body in the library.
But we did.
I’d seen the dead man before, although we hadn’t met. He’d been in the Great Library the first time we visited that magnificent room. He was the one who had given Carolyn a bad moment when his gaze fixed on her. At the time he’d been seated on a fruitwood fiddleback chair in front of the little leather-topped writing desk, and he’d been writing letters, I’d assumed, scribbling away furiously, then pausing to cap his pen and gaze off into the middle distance, then uncapping the pen and scribbling anew.
Now he lay a few yards from the fireplace, and no farther than that from the shelf where I’d spotted The Big Sleep—and where I could see it still, I was pleased to note. He was dressed as he’d been the previous evening, wearing a camelhair blazer with leather buttons over a tattersall vest and dark brown corduroy slacks. His shoes were chukka boots, and one of the bootlaces had come untied.
He lay on his back, sprawled at the base of the library steps. His dark hair was still neatly combed, but blood had flowed from a scalp wound, staining the carpet beneath his head. His strong features were softened
in death, and his dark eyes, which had gazed with such intensity in life, were as glassy as those in the stuffed oryx.
The oryx, of course, was nowhere to be seen, having remained on the wall of the East Parlour. This placed it in the minority, as almost every other resident of Cuttleford House had responded to the outcry the way automatic elevators respond to a fire in a high-rise office building. They rush right to it, mindless of the danger, and that was just what we had done.
The hour may have had something to do with it. It was the crack of dawn, and I don’t suppose Carolyn and I were the only ones who’d been sound asleep until the cry awakened us. If we’d been reading Jane Austen, say, or playing gin rummy, we might have responded in a more gradual fashion, instead of leaping out of bed, throwing on clothes, and plunging headlong down the stairs toward the source of the disturbance.
There were five folks in the library when we got there, not counting the dead man, and there were quite a few more by the time we’d caught our breath. The screamer, I learned, was a pretty little blonde named Molly Cobbett. She was the downstairs maid, and had come in to open the drapes and tidy the room, and had responded in traditional fashion when she suddenly came face to face with the late Jonathan Rathburn.
That, Nigel Eglantine informed us, was the name of the deceased. Eglantine had been in the library when Carolyn and I burst in, as had Molly Cobbett, of course, along with Colonel Edward Blount-Buller and the redoubtable Orris, whose eyes seemed to be set even closer together than I remembered them. Others were quick to join us—Millicent Savage, her parents, Gordon Wolpert, Cissy Eglantine. The cook stood off to one side, fussing with her apron and looking quite distraught, while a red-haired young thing with a complexion that was just one big freckle gaped at the fallen guest, at once appalled and delighted that life could be so like the tabloids. (She was the upstairs maid, I later learned, and a cousin of Molly’s, the daughter of Molly’s father’s brother Earl. Earlene Cobbett was her name.)